A visit to West Seattle's Constellation Park

If you are looking for a low-key spot to visit and get away from it all a little during holiday week, Constellation Park and Marine Reserve in West Seattle would be an excellent choice. One can hardly call this a hidden gem, given that it is right out in the open along Beach Drive SW west of 63rd Avenue SW, but although we’ve ridden our bicycles right down that street many times, we didn’t realize there was an astronomy feature there until we stumbled across it recently on the Seattle Parks website.

It appears that Constellation Park was dedicated in 1999, according to a plaque on the site. It is one of several small parks that were created in the neighborhood during the 1990s, all of which came about through partnerships between local artist Lezlie Jane, the Alki Community Council, and the City’s Neighborhood Matching Fund. Part of the reason for the limited visibility of the park is that, formally, it is attached to the Charles Richey Sr. Viewpoint, which itself is an extension of Alki Beach Park. It is along Beach Drive south of the Alki Point Lighthouse and south of the main business district along Alki. It is a popular destination for whale watching and, during low tides or after storms, is a paradise for beachcombers.

There are three main attractions at Constellation Park and Marine Reserve: an interpretive marine reserve, a commemoration of a rare planetary alignment, and the Avenue of Stars.

Marine reserve

The marine reserve includes a tidepool sculpture by artist Jane that features starfish, snails, clams, and an octopus. A nearby interpretive wall done in tile sports illustrations of intertidal flora and fauna that can be found on local beaches.

Planetary alignment

There was a rare alignment of planets on Dec. 5, 1997, when seven of the eight planets other than Earth were all in the same section of the sky. The positions of the planets during that alignment are noted by brass markers set into the sidewalk right at the end of the park near 63rd and Beach.

It would have been impossible to see Pluto at that time and place; you always need a good telescope and pretty dark skies to spot it. Uranus and Neptune would have been extremely challenging, too, until the sky got a bit darker. But Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury would have been pretty easy to spot, given clear weather. Saturn was the only planet not involved. It’s fun to note that, at least at Constellation Park, Pluto is still and always will be a planet. There were some sidewalk markings at the site on our most recent visit, indicating possible construction or utility activity in the future. We hope it doesn’t disrupt the solar system!

Avenue of Stars

The highlight of Constellation Park is the Avenue of Stars, which begins at about 64th and Beach Drive and runs along Beach almost to Benton Place. Representations of 27 constellations are embedded in the sidewalk, with one brass star for each star of the given constellation’s well-known asterism. The biggest and brightest stars are identified by name. The constellations are grouped on the sidewalk by the season during which they’re visible at around 10 p.m. from Constellation Park. It’s a good spot for stargazing, as the park essentially looks out over Puget Sound to the south and west, with good horizons for spotting constellations and other celestial objects in all directions.

Woody Sullivan, a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Washington, is listed as an in-kind donor to the project, no doubt lending his scientific expertise to the art of the project. Sullivan has had a hand in much public astronomy art and information, particularly on a number of sundials in the area.

Orion as depicted in brass on the
Avenue of the Stars in West Seattle.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Each constellation in the park is accompanied by a plaque that identifies the constellation, notes the season during which it is best visible, and includes a message from one of the donors who helped fund the project. Some of these notes are memorials to loved ones or simply positive vibes for the universe. We’re especially fond of the thought that was placed by Timothy Michael Holtschlag on the marker that accompanies the constellation Scorpius:

“Gazing at the stars I see light that has traveled vast distances of time and space and know that I am connected to everything.”

We couldn’t find this specific quote with a quick Internet search, so presume it is an original written by Mr. Holtschlag. Certainly a similar sentiment has been expressed many times, from Galileo and Einstein to Tennyson and Chief Seattle, and it captures the allure astronomy has for many of us, amateur or professional.

So, wander down to Constellation Park a little before sunset on the next clear evening. Find the constellations that are visible on the season. Then wait for night to fall and enjoy some ancient light from far across the universe.

The power of unseen light

Megan Watzke thinks about light a lot. Watzke is press officer for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and she’s the co-author of three books: Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2015); Your Ticket to the Universe: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos (Smithsonian Books, 2013); and Coloring the Universe: An Insider’s Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space (University of Alaska Press, 2015). Watzke gave a talk about Light at Town Hall Seattle last week.

Watzke pointed out that there are seven different categories of light, and we’re all familiar with them all, and yet sometimes we forget that it’s all just light.

“Light in its various forms is not different,” she said. “It’s the same phenomenon, it’s just different wavelengths.”

“We use these different types of light every single day,” Watzke added, “or we’re affected by them every single day.”

Watzke said the seven categories are a bit arbitrary and move around a bit depending on the science being done. But they all share similar characteristics. They travel at the same speed, and can bounce and bend or be absorbed or blocked. It’s at different wavelengths that it does different things, and the wavelengths can vary from miles to less than the width of an atom.

Seven categories of light

Radio waves. The longest wavelength, Watzke pointed out that we don’t actually hear radio waves, but that electronics translate the changes in compressed air created by sound. But our mobile phones, GPS devices, bluetooth headsets, MRI tests, and garage door openers all use radio waves.

Microwaves. We use them to cook things, and satellite TV trucks use them to beam video around the world.

Infrared light. Infrared light has many uses. Your TV remote control employs infrared, which can also be used to create warmth. Astronomers can see celestial objects in the infrared when visible light is blocked by interstellar dust.

Visible light. A tiny part of the spectrum. Watzke said that if all of light was a piano keyboard, what we can see would be a few keys around middle-C. But it’s important, as it is why we can see things, is a source of sustainable, non-fossil-fuel energy, and is a key to photosynthesis.

Ultraviolet. UV light can cause sunburn, but can also be useful to destroy microbes, and is used for security on currency or credit cards. Ultraviolet also includes black light, which Watzke joked is an “important part of raves and Halloween parties.”

X-rays. We all know about the medical uses of X-rays, which can cause cancer or be used to combat it. In astronomy objects emit X-rays if they’re extremely hot or energetic, like material falling into a black hole.

Gamma Rays. Watzke called gamma rays the “most energetic thing we know about.” They can be harmful, but like ultraviolet can kill microbes and also has uses such as the sterilization of food.

False color

Author Megan Watzke explained the powers
of the different wavelengths of light during
her talk Dec. 8, 2015 at Town Hall Seattle.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Watzke took some time to talk about the term “false color,” which she finds to be a misnomer. She said false color is not fake color. When scientists create images in false color they are simply trying to represent light that we cannot actually see.

“What is done with scientific images that involve invisible wavelengths is that color is applied to wavelengths and then stacked together, frequently, so you have multiple layers that look like a multiple-color image,” Watzke said. “These are real data, but a layer of color is applied.”

“It’s translating the data that is invisible into something that you can actually see,” she added, comparing the process to the way one would use color to represent different temperatures on a weather map.

She would prefer the term representative color; perhaps it will catch on!

Watzke will talk more about the creation of astronomical images when she discusses Coloring the Universe along with co-author Travis Rector at Wednesday’s meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

Watzke said that she wrote Light to make the topic a little more accessible.

“I want people to understand that light is all around us and that science is all around us,” she said. “Science isn’t something to be scared of or be intimidated by. It’s something that we all should be able to enjoy and pursue.”

More information:

• Recording of Watzke’s talk from Town Hall Seattle
• The trailer for Light, below

Answering the ultimate questions

There is a crisis in physics today, but Adam Frank sees it as an opportunity rather than a threat. Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and co-founder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, gave a talk last week at the University of Washington titled, “Beyond the Big Bang: Cosmology and Ultimate Questions.” Frank, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the UW, was back on campus for the last in a series of lectures titled The Big Bang and Beyond, which was sponsored by the university’s alumni association as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy.

Modern mythology

Frank called the Big Bang a bit of “modern mythology,” an origin narrative that puts us into a cosmic context and gives the universe meaning.

Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of
Rochester and frequent NPR science commentator, gave a
lecture at the University of Washington Dec. 2, 2015.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Science tells us that there is no meaning,” Frank noted. “We can argue about that. But even not having a meaning is meaning. In that sense the Big Bang is a powerful origin myth for our culture.”

While he called it an origin narrative, Frank pointed out that many people have a misconception about the Big Bang Theory.

“It is not a theory of the beginning,” he pointed out. “The Big Bang never tells you why it’s there.”

It gets close; within about 10^-32 seconds of the start.

“We can do a pretty good job of telling you in detail what the history of the universe had been going back to some tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang,” Frank said.

Fine tuning

That tiny fraction of a second is where some weighty riddles reside. For the Big Bang to work, we have to assume that the initial conditions were the same as they are now. There’s a lengthy list of constants in the math that describes the universe, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant. All of them have to be just so.

“You change one of those numbers by just a tiny amount and life could never form,” Frank noted. So how did we end up in a universe that is perfectly fine tuned for us to arrive on the scene?

“If you’re an intelligent design person you say, ‘Oh, it’s God that did it,’” Frank said. “If you’re a physicist, that’s not going to work very well for you. What you want as a physicist is a theory that predicts these.”

“People often talk about cosmology as being the place where science butts up against theology, but physicists don’t want that to be the case,” he continued. “They want to have coherent physical explanations for something like where the Big Bang came from.”

Coherent is in the mind of the beholder, but it may well be that such an explanation has yet to emerge. Frank refers to the most prominent ideas so far as the “standard crazy” and the “alternative crazy.” And it’s from these crazy ideas that the crisis emerges.

Standard crazy

The first standard crazy idea is that of multiverses. With an infinite number of universes popping up all over, fine tuning is no longer an issue. There’s bound to be a universe with our exact conditions, and that’s the one we live in.

Then there is string theory, which arose out of the search for a quantum theory of gravity. String theory can reproduce standard-model particles, and it includes a gravity particle. People got pretty excited about a “theory of everything.”

There are problems within the standard crazy. Unobservable multiverses. Hidden dimensions. The existence of 10⁵⁰⁰ universes. And it all may lie beyond possible experimentation.

“People are really starting to push back on multiverse and string theory—these ‘standard crazy’ ideas—saying these things may be untestable,” Frank said. “If they’re untestable they’re not science, and if they’re not science it’s time for people to stop talking about them.”

“All of the work that was done on string theory and the multiverse may, in the end, turn out to be, in some sense, a wrong direction,” he added.

Alternative crazy

Other far-out ideas have been proposed. British physicist Julian Barbour puts forward the notion that time doesn’t exist, and that every moment is a distinct and separate now. Lee Smolin suggests that we reboot cosmology entirely, and consider that our “timeless” laws are anything but; that physical laws may in fact be evolving.

“It could be totally wrong, but it’s illustrative of the difference of where you have to go to try and think about going beyond and before the Big Bang without getting into the conceptual problems that string theory and the multiverse lead to,” Frank said.

A good crisis

Frank sees this crisis in physics as an opportunity.

“The crisis in physics is great because what it’s going to mean is that we’re going to have to come up with even different ideas,” he said. “We’re going to have to probe our understanding of reality even deeper, and what we’re slowly heading toward is some kind of truth. It may not be the ultimate truth, but we’ve been approaching a better understanding of the world since science has begun.”

Frank said that, with a seemingly endless stream of terrible headlines in the news, he sees the search for this ultimate reality as an example of what we do best.

“Humanity is capable of such incredible stupidity and horror, and yet we’re also capable of such compassion, and such wonder, and the ability to experience such awe,” Frank said. “The quest for ultimate reality is a fundamental expression of human goodness and hope.”

More reading

• NY Times op-ed: A Crisis at the Edge of Physics
• Adam Frank website

Books by Adam Frank